re: Looks Like a Fine Night to Brew some Beer....Updated Bottling

Naw man I'm not dicking around with a kit, I got the idea and I'm not worried about doing it at all.

shite is badass

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Be back in a few days to Bottle.

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I think Zappa has bigger fish to fry tonight than his beer.

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well I'm glad somebody bumped this thread. I hadn't seen his latest update.

My Strawberry Honey blonde from the thread I posted a bunch of pictures in is drinking real nice.

I dry hopped in the secondary for 10 days.

Lets Bottle! Many people don't enjoy bottling and so they buy kegging equipment. That's fine, but I generally have 5-10 different brews in bottles which would mean investing in a multi-keg system. I don't mind bottling. Cleaning the bottles is what is time consuming but I try not to clean 40-50 bottles all at once. I'll clean 10-15 one day. 10-15 a few days later....pretty soon I have 100 clean bottles.

Cleaning: First, you can save bottles from commercial brewers. Just pour your beer and immediately rinse the bottle with water. Fill it up with tap water once, I fill twice and empty. Try to only save the bottles that are not Screw cap type. These don't seal as well. Soon you have a bunch of empties sitting around.

Next, I take all thse empties and soak them in a container filled with Oxy Clean. Oxy Clean is a great cleaner for all your beer equipment and bottles. Soaking bottles or equipment in Oxy Clean for a couple of days = no scrubing hardly ever. If your bottles still have the labels on them, the oxy clean melts its off 90% of the time.

I use a plastic storage bin as my cleaning container.

Empty collection:

The next day is bottling day. We need to add sugar to our beer so the yeast can eat anf fart out C02 which will give us carbonation. The yeast have already eaten all the sugars from the grains we mashed at the beginning to produce alcohol. C02 is the byproduct and the reason we had a blow off tube in our primary fermenter....to relieve the pressure build up. This time, we will have caps on the bottles so pressure will build up in them. So you need to carefully measure how much sugar you put in the beer. Too much and Kapow, bottle break. Not enough and the beer will be flat. General rule of thumb is 3/4 of a cup of corn sugar per 5 gallon batch of beer. Corn sugar is a cheap sugar available at your Homebrew store. It has no flavor so wont affect your beer. You can use most any sugar, even table sugar. But you'll get differing results. I've used turbinado sugar before and I didnt notice a taste. So I get my corn sugar that is stored in the fridge.

Mix in filtered water....no exact amount. I just put in enough to cover plus a half inch above the corn sugar.

While waiting on the sugar to cool, we can sanitize our bottling bucket.